Leaving this dream public for now, since because of extreme crack and some actual plot and stuff it may as well be fanfic. Also, this is the first in-depth dream I've had featuring the Avengers, so what the hell.

In which fake-Hawkeye nearly takes over the world because I am a bad cat-sitter and Tony Stark won't accept my calls.

It started out kind of normal-world. I was living somewhere else on the second or third floor of a building with a huge back yard that was bordered by a forest, and had a ginger cat. I had left the window open one night and the cat got out so I was franticly looking for him. And then it went into my usual sort of crack dream (not too usual lately, but still) because while I was looking I kept getting pissed off calls from Tony Stark because my cat was actually Hawkeye, who was sometimes a small ginger cat because of something a bad guy did once (Hawkeye might have been a were-kitten now that I think about it, except the cat version of him was about a year or so past kittenhood), and had no idea he was a person when he was a cat.

Anyway, Tony Stark was pissed off at me because they needed Hawkeye for a mission and I let him get out and he'd probably be lost forever now because he couldn't turn back human on his own. Hawkeye needed some kind of handwave-chemical to turn back human for a day or so before reverting to being a cat. I have no idea why I was Hawkeye's guardian while he was in cat form, but I felt absolutely horrible about him getting out.

So I was running around looking under shrubbery, half-listening to Stark chew me out over my cell phone and feeling really upset about it all when I found a ginger cat, but I was pretty sure he wasn't Hawkeye because his ears were too dark a shade of orange. The cat responded to the name but I wasn't convinced at all and was about to go keep looking for the real Hawkeye when Stark flew in in the Iron Man suit. Tony lifted the mask, glared at me and dumped an ampule of liquid over the cat's head. The cat turned into a guy who was totally not Hawkeye. He looked more like the Collector with a bad dye job and a goatee. Stark was somehow convinced this was Hawkeye though, grabbed him around the waist and flew off with him while I was standing there going "Wait, but, that's obviously not...!"

Then the dream switched to a third person view montage of this guy infiltrating the Avengers. Somehow everyone was instantly convinced he was Hawkeye, even when he couldn't shoot an arrow worth a damn and started displaying an impressive array of shark and spider related mutant powers, including a shark scale cloak he could extrude from his neck or collar (symbiote?) or something to make him invisible. The Avengers took this all like "Yeah, of course Hawkeye could always turn invisible and shoot webs and had a giant mouth with rows and rows of sharp teeth! What's your problem?"

So, there was a montage of this guy on missions (most of which were near-disasters that he somehow managed to come in at the last minute and "save the day" in front of the news cameras) and media interaction with him specifically (and the media were all "wow, look at what Hawkeye can do!" but they had an excuse for not realizing that was weird because the real Hawkeye'd been avoiding talking to the press at all so for all they knew he was always a mutant spider-shark). It slowly became less missions and more media interviews and public appearances, and then something like a performance tour as "Hawkeye" kept revealing new powers. The other Avengers were now starting to wonder what the hell was going on with Hawkeye (at this point the guy was dressing like Elvis in a white sparkly bodysuit and had 'recruited' an Igor-like henchman into the group which no one had really thought was weird at the time either). Fake-Hawkeye seemed far more interested in getting them to be backup performers in his international "Watch 'Hawkeye' do weird stuff!" tour that was filling bigger and bigger venues than in going out and doing any hero-type stuff.

They confronted him about it intervention-like, and he got all pissed off and went "I'll just go solo, I don't need you guys anymore!" He went off to do solo performances that didn't have much drop in attendance, taking his henchman with him. The Avengers were all "Um, what?" and after he left started to become aware that this guy had never been Hawkeye at all (so I suppose one of his initial powers was immediate proximity obfuscation, the full mind control didn't kick in until later). Of course they started to really get pissed off. They decided to crash the guy's next performance, a super-huge arena performance with about fifty thousand attendees and broadcast live throughout the world, like it was the Olympics or something.

The Avengers all turned up at the event just as the guy was unleashing some kind of mass enslavement/super mind-control thing on everyone watching in the arena and at home on the simulcast (a power which he didn't have before because his audience wasn't big enough and he was draining the, like, fan-energy from people to feed his powers? Not sure how that worked). It didn't work on the Avengers because they had already escaped his influence and were now immune because they were too damned pissed off to be influenced by it anymore.

Then (as usual, my dream mostly fails at combat sequences) there was a huge chaotic incomprehensible battle of the Avengers versus fake-Hawkeye and his henchman and an arena full of mind-enslaved normal people who the guy had set on 'defend your Master' mode and so were ineffectually attacking the Avengers (who were trying really hard not to harm anyone) or crowding around fake-Hawkeye as human shields. Insert incomprehensible combat sequence here.

In the incomprehensible combat, the Henchman was dissipated (turned out he was a minor Imp from Hell or something, Hulk beat the crap out of him and he turned into swirling dust and went away). All the Avengers were hurt and/or altered in some weird way when fake-Hawkeye went all out attack and started throwing magic spells everywhere after his control over the mass-enslavement was blocked. (That was accomplished by Jarvis, Thor and Captain America; Jarvis worked out a blocking frequency and told Thor, Thor tuned his hammer/lightning and shot that frequency of energy bolt into the curved side of Cap's shield which acted as an amplifier and parabolic reflector and spread the effect to all who were controlled in some handwavey way.) When the signal was blocked the regular people all went into neutral stand-by mode, standing around blankly wherever they were when the link dropped, still getting in the way but not actively interfereing because they were still controlled but had no controller. Which was great, but the Avengers still kept having to pause mid-combat to move someone gently out of the way, so the bystanders were still being an impediment to taking down fake-Hawkeye.

Meanwhile, Hulk had been made intangible so he couldn't physically contact anything, he just passes right through (and as a result was spinning around in mid-air in an ineffectual green tornado like the cartoon Tazmanian Devil), Thor had been miniaturized (shooting off tiny bolts of static electricity and squeaking threats in iambic pentameter), and Cap had been sped up 1000 times in relation to the world (which might seem useful except no one could understand what he was saying for tactical orders, making the combat even more scrambled, and he couldn't really interact with anything at all either, plus he was rapidly aging). Iron Man was flying full-speed towards fake-Hawkeye intent on ramming him in the face with both fists, but was stuck in a kind of black-hole-like time dilation, where the closer he got to fake-Hawkeye, the slower he was going relative to the rest of the world, and wouldn't actually impact fake-Hawkeye for several million years, so it looked like he was just hanging in mid-air, drifting infinitessimally closer. Black Widow was either a disembodied head, or was stuck up to her neck in the floor but capable of swimming through it in some way. Not sure. She was moving around with her neck at the level of the floor (which was a horrible off-green and grey textured tile, my dream found it important to note several times, no idea why).

The fight ended when Black Widow's head got up next to the invisible edge of fake-Hawkeye's extruded shark-skin invisibility cloak. She bit it and started pulling on it, growling. It tore off of fake-Hawkeye, and the mind control and all the illisions fell. There was pandemonium among the regular people as they woke up but they were all trying to get out of the way then, so that actually helped. The returned-to-not-magically-messed-up Avengers grabbed the guy (who was of course an evil overlord of some sort) and neutralized him. Cue clean up and aftermath and all the media there to cover the performance reporting the events, etc.

Then the dream did a 'meanwhile' back to me and the real cat-Hawkeye (who I had found shortly after Stark left with the evil guy), sitting on a sofa (which might have been the one at 221b Baker Street, not because that's where I was living or because I was Sherlock or anythng like that, but more because even my dream-self doesn't like sitting on my own real sofa), watching all this happening on the news. (There was a brief memory montage of me packing cat-Hawkeye around in one arm while trying to get ahold of Stark to tell him obviously he's got the wrong cat-turned-human or whatever the fake Hawkeye is, and can I please get an ampule of that stuff to turn the real Hawkeye back and he can tell you himself? I kept getting sent to Pepper or voice-mail and then eventually blocked because they all firmly believed the spider-shark jerk was the real Hawkeye, and that I'd lost my mind. I was immune to the subsequent mind control because I knew the real Hawkeye is with me, and he was immune because he was a cat at the time.)

Back to the sofa where me and cat-Hawkeye were watching the news reports of the aftermath of the final battle, facepalming in our own ways. I suggested to cat-Hawkeye we get him an ear tattoo or a microchip or have some kind of code-word so in future evil spider-shark villains who look vaguely like Benicio del Toro with bad hair and a goatee wouldn't be able to convince anyone they're him. Cat-Hawkeye ignored me and kept grooming.

That's when I woke up.

I'd like to think that shortly after that, me and Cat-Hawkeye got a lovely and sincere apology from Tony Stark for not believing me and blocking my calls.

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